1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to content management systems, and more specifically relates to processing compound documents in a content management system.
2. Background Art
Content management systems (CMSs) have been developed and allow many users to efficiently share electronic content such as text, audio files, video files, pictures, graphics, etc. Content management systems typically control access to content in a repository. A user may generate content, and when the content is checked into the repository, the content may be subsequently processed by the CMS according to predefined rules. A user may also check out content from the repository, or link to content in the repository while generating content. The rules in a CMS assure that content that comes into or out of the system or that is linked to meets desired criteria specified in the rules.
Compound documents have become popular in content management systems. Compound documents typically include multiple links to multiple other documents (or components) in the content management system. For the disclosure and claims herein, the term “compound document” includes any document in a content management system that includes one or more links to one or more components (e.g., documents) in the repository in the content management system. One example of a compound document that is commercially available is called the Electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulatory agencies dictate that documents submitted electronically must adhere to the eCTD standard.
Because of the importance and widespread use of compound documents, attempts have been made to improve compound document assembly in content management systems. For example, the concepts of “auto population” and “auto suggestion” are known in the art. Auto population refers to the content management system automatically determining a component in the repository that should be linked to at a particular link location in a compound document. Auto suggestion refers to the content management system providing suggestions to a user that helps the user make more intelligent decisions for which component should be linked to at a particular link location in a compound document. The use of auto suggestion can significantly reduce the time the user has to spend searching or browsing the repository for the right components to link into a compound document.
Known methods for performing auto population or auto suggestion include the use of named queries, the identification of a component for a link location based on surrounding metadata, and document-centric auto population based on link popularity. The use of named queries is very limited because named queries are typically defined in advance based on assumptions about the placement of resulting candidate document links and the type of metadata used to find those candidate documents. By predefining named queries, the content management system is then at the mercy of how well the named queries were defined, and whether those definitions meet future needs.
Identification of a component for a link location may be done by examining surrounding metadata. This is more dynamic and flexible than the named queries discussed above because it takes into account the applicability of the surrounding context in the metadata when identifying a candidate component for a given link location. For example, metadata from a parent or sibling XML component may be used to alter the identification of components to provide more dynamic suggestions. However, this approach has limitations because the surrounding context may not have enough information to run an adequate query.
Document-centric auto population based on link popularity was discussed in the parent patent application entitled “AUTONOMIC UPDATING OF TEMPLATES IN A CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM,” U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/692,693 filed on Mar. 28, 2007. A component for a link in a compound document may be identified by the system based on the individual popularity based on the amount of reuse of the component. This type of automatic identification of components does not take into account any associations or relationships between the components, or any specified conditions for reusing a component.
A problem with all three of the prior art approaches outlined above is all of these approaches are document-centric. As a result, identifying a component for a particular link location is based solely on how each individual component may fit into a particular compound document or type of compound document, without taking into consideration any relationships or conditions that may affect efficient identification of a component for a link location in a content management system. Without a way for a content management system to account for relationships between components or defined conditions in identifying a component for a particular link location in a compound document, known content management systems will not be able to perform auto-population or auto-suggest functions in an optimal way.